Making Killer Book Charms – Part Two

You’ve got your glorious book cover images all cut out and your supplies are probably teasing you from the counter-top, so you’re ready to go for the next stage in making your killer book charms.

First, go put on clothes you don’t care about. An old t-shirt that could use a few more stains works. I’ll wait here.

Planning concerns: Don’t start this when you need to bake bread or do anything else that will put flour or the like into the air. This is a #LFMF moment. I had mine set aside, the glazing well underway. While they were drying, I baked. Flour particles can travel a remarkable distance, it turns out.

What You’ll Need:

• -Polymer Clay
• -Your rolling pin
• -A surface
• -A craft knife
• -Some sort of detailing tool
• -Your headpins or eyepins
• -Ranger Inkssentials Glossy Accent
• -Parchment for your cookie sheet
• -Wax paper for later
• -Small clamps

Preparing Your Work Surface:

Please be sure to use a cutting board for this that has a little texture (because gluing the books into the covers will work better), but don’t use one that you ever intend to use again. If there’s a way to get the stains off of cutting boards left by sculpey, I sure haven’t found it. No amount of scrubbing seems to work. Don’t use your self-healing mat either, because sculpey leaves a residue that gets into the tiny healed slices and stains any paper or anything later. Here’s what mine looks like.

Fold Your Books:

• -Do this before you touch clay. Once you touch clay, you only want to touch the “sacrificial” book covers. It will leave invisible marks that suddenly become ridiculously visible when you start glazing.
• -Fold the book covers so that they look like books. Press the folds well, but don’t run your nail down them (like when doing other folds) because it will leave lines that show up later.
• -Pull out your sacrifices! For every 10 books, you’ll need one cover for forming and trimming. The covers stretch after a bit, so that’s why you need one for every 10 books you’re making. Put the rest of them aside and safe from your clay-ey fingers. You will also need a single sacrificial cover but only the actual cover part. Cut that front cover off and set it aside for cutting out the white.
• -This is what it looks like when you get clay marks that show up only after you’ve done days of glazing.

Mix and Roll:

• -Hint: Do the white first. I use one side of the cutting board for white and the other for colors. Just chop off your chunk of white and start working it with your hands until it’s soft enough to roll. Don’t work it too much because it will get sticky. Depending on how thick the book is, I get variable numbers of books per chunk. But white is common to all the books, so you’ll always need more white than colors. I usually work with about 1/2 ounce at a time.
• -Roll out the white using the pink thickness band on the rolling pin for an average sized book. If your book is thicker, then roll it a little thicker. If you’re doing a novella that is quite thin, then you’ll only be using white. Those are special cases. For novellas or short stories, roll out to pink, then you’ll use two of them for each book, sandwiching the eyepin/headpin in between the layers.
• -When you’re done rolling out any sculpey, lift it up and flip it over. That will allow you to cut out your forms without stretching it because it’s sticking. It all sticks some, but a textured board really helps.
• -Cut your white. Take your sacrificial book cover, the one that is just the front cover, and lay it over your white. Cut out with your craft knife and carefully set that aside. Do that for all the books you intend to make. Line them up in a safe space where they won’t stick together or to a surface but you can still grab them easily when assembling.
• -Mix your colors. You can buy a sampler that has the color you want in it, or buy the small 2 ounce blocks in the color you want, but I find that I rarely have exactly the color I want. Instead, I mix them to create a color that matches the cover in some way. Here is a super-handy chart for general mixing. I love it. I don’t usually have all the exact colors, but it’s easy to substitute with one you do have and get a color that works splendidly. The best basic mixing set is linked in the Amazon widget below, as well as the Premo White in a larger (and therefore more economical size), but from there you can just follow the also-boughts to colors of all sorts. Hint: If you want to buy a huge chunk at Michael’s you can use a coupon to get it cheaper. Better yet, buy one of their totally overpriced samplers using a 40% off coupon! Otherwise, Amazon is usually cheaper.
• -Mix and knead until you have your color.  Roll this out as thin as you can get it. I use the interior band (mine is lavender) on my rolling pin and even then, sometimes I pull it up and press it thinner. Remember to flip it. Then lay out the sacrifice and cut around it. From this point on, you’ll be doing them one at a time, so just cut the one. Leave a very small margin of slop around the edges.

Form Your Book:

• -Leaving your clay in the book cover, flip it over and make sure it is covered edge to edge. Then very carefully fold at the rear book hinge very slightly, just enough to make a bit of a line you can see. If it looks too thick at the spine of the book to you, you can use the little wooden tool visible in my work-surface photo to press the clay near the hinges to make it a little thinner.
• -Lay it down, bottom edge of the book nearest you. Then carefully place one of your interior white pieces on top of that lower piece of clay, so that the edge of the white is as snugly fit to the spine of the book as possible.
• -Now you’ll insert your pin. Making sure that the head or eye of the pin is at the bottom edge of the book, press the pin into the white clay as close to the center as possible. You can see how the pin should look in the photo of my fails above. I try to press the pin in so that it gets to the middle of the white and then use the little tool to close up the seam a little.
• -Carefully fold over the top portion of the book so that you make a book sandwich. Press it firmly but not so much you deform it. It will be slopping all out the sides, but that’s what we’ll do next.
• -Once you have the book nice and pressed together, take the other craft knife, the one that is like a pen with a controllable handle, and cut off the edges. To do this best, I find that holding the book between two fingers in my left hand and cutting with a motion almost like paring fruit works best. It’s a little fidgety around the pin, but you can do it! You should wind up with something like this.

 

Line ’em Up:

• -As you create each book, place it gently on a cookie sheet that is covered in parchment paper. This is important so you don’t scorch your books. Leave plenty of space between each book.
• -Pre-heat your oven to 275 degrees F and if you can, check to be sure the heat is actually 275. Sculpey will turn brownish if cooked for too long or at too high a temperature.
• -Only bake books of very similar thicknesses at the same time. Again, because thicker ones take longer you run the risk of burning the thinner ones.
• -Here’s the way I lay them out.

Bake and Press:

• -Bake according to directions. In my oven, it’s about 20 minutes for a thicker book like those above. You’ll need to tweak that for your oven. Some people need a few more minutes and others need the exact amount recommended. When they come out, they’ll feel a bit gummy so you’ll doubt yourself.
• -When you take them out of the oven, press on the books a little with a towel to flatten a bit more. Not too hard.
• -Take them off the pan immediately to let them cool. They should feel hard and cured within a couple of minutes.

Glue and Set:

• -Now you’ll actually make the books! So exciting! Alas, also no more fun playing with grown-up play-doh, so there’s that. Oh, and I’m really sorry about your manicure.
• -If you don’t have the clamps from the supply list, you can use the little marble pieces for this part, though it’s a little riskier. What you for sure don’t want to do is accidentally glue the books to a surface. First, you’ve got to fit and trim them.
• -Take one of your clean book covers and one of your baked clay interiors and fit it. You’ll likely see some sticking out, but it shouldn’t be much, due to the stretching and individuality of the pieces. Use the pen-type blade to trim it up until it fits perfectly. I basically shave off little bits of the edges.

• -Once it fits like a glove, and there are no gaps anywhere either, then put a bit of Ranger Inkssentials on the inside of the cover. (Hint: Ranger Inkssentials Gloss is actually a dimensional glaze, but it works best of all bestest as the glue also. The glue meant for sculpey is crap for this purpose. I usually make a little figure eight and then spread it around with a toothpick. Spread a very thin coat on the interior spine as well. Now, stick that book into the cover and press like crazy until it is perfectly fit.
• -You’ll want to be very sure that the edges are glued. Otherwise they will roll or flap when it comes time to lacquer them.
• -Now, clamp the edge and stand it up on the edge of your cookie sheet. Without clamps, then rest the on the bits of marble after making very sure you have no Inkssentials on the back. Leave them alone. They will dry within an hour, but you really want them to cure. If you test after an hour, you’ll probably notice the book feels cold, too cold. That means it’s still curing. Let it be till morning. It should look a bit like this (the second one is from first stage glazing, but it looks the same for gluing):

 

Next Time:

In Part Three, we’ll do the glazing, which is a 6 day saga (four if you use the cheater method that has more risk). And after that, we’ll make things with book charms! Yippee for stuff!

Here is your shopping widget, but check the Supplies Post in case you can find stuff cheaper other places.